Thing 8

RSS. Really simple sydication. Really simple sorting really. I like the idea of information sorting done by someone else to make my life simpler. Because I simply don't have the time to sort through all that info myself! I first heard about RSS when Walter Betts introduced RSS and wikis at Library Expo 2005. I understood wikis when he was done but couldn't quite wrap my mind around RSS. It's just one of those things I avoided until having to investigate it here. I've signed up for 7 feeds: BBC News, Christian Science Monitor, Google News, and NPR news. For fun, I've signed up for The Martha Blog for my inner homemaker. I've also signed up for Justine Larbalestier (the YA author married to Scott Westerfeld whom I heard speak at TLA this year) and The Top Shelf, of course! On The Top Shelf, I like the current links to 60 Second Science and the list of movies based on poems...very timely with the Beowulf movie.
I've been subscribing to a number of newsletters already but I do like the immediacy of RSS. Ideally, I want to find more library-oriented sites. I hope to use them as my personal ongoing staff development. I'd like to read about the great ideas of other high school librarians. I want to stay on top of the best YA fiction. I'll keep looking for better sites in this area with RSS feeds. On my home computer, I'll look for sites relevant to my interests. I want to find sites for fun!
In our library, it would be fun to create links to author's feeds so that our students could easily access them. We'll think about whether or not this is possible. Can a library have a google account? I guess not since it doesn't have an email account! I still have a lot to learn and experience about RSS but it seems ideal to organize important information pertinent to our students and the library in general. It seems like something we could be teaching our students but knowing our students, I bet they could be teaching us!